FC

Fibre Channel

Fibre Channel Protocol

SwiftTest has added SCSI over Fibre Channel transport to its existing powerful suite of protocols. The FC offering includes a full-featured FC initiator, which is essential for system level validation of storage as well as storage networking environments.

Related Resources:

FC Datasheet (PDF)

The solution has the ability to drive FC traffic at line rate on every port at 4/8G speeds. FC protocol support includes connectivity either directly to FC targets, as well as to FC SAN switches. Targets are automatically discovered and presented to the user.

A rich suite of SCSI commands is presented for detailed system level testing. This suite covers the entire set of mandatory SCSI commands for disk. Commands specified to the user are injected directly at the SCSI layer, ensuring unparalleled performance, repeatability and scalability.

SCSI Commands

  • Fine grain control over data traffic at the SCSI level
  • No OS or other optimizations ensures that exact SCSI workloads can be replicated
  • SCSI Mandatory command support
  • Direct transmission from SCSI layer (no OS interference)
  • Detailed SCSI graphs and statistics

Fibre Channel Transport

  • FC switch connectivity support (FC-SW)
  • FC direct and loop target connectivity support (FC-P2P and FC-AL)
  • NPIV for up to 255 logins/port
  • Packet capture and decode, reporting, graphing and statistics

“We were tired of ‘testing’ our networked storage in production. With SwiftTest we save a lot of money by controlling our cost vs. performance vs. availability equation. And I sleep at night knowing our storage will perform in production.”

— Storage Engineer,
Cloud Service Provider

SCSI Workloads

  • Specify FC level actions as well as SCSI level actions in the same test scenario
  • Mix and match actions and scenarios and vary load profiles to create different traffic and load patterns
  • Detailed statistics that and graphs that report SCSI actions, errors, data sent/received, etc.
  • Workload support for emulating standard test tools like IOmeter, via the automation API
  • The automation API allows for complex scripting to achieve virtually any task needed with the protocol commands supported